Good Riddance to Brotherhood’s Fake Democrats

July 4 (Bloomberg) -- A few months ago, King Abdullah II of
Jordan told me about his meetings with Mohamed Mursi, the now-deposed president of Egypt. The king wasn’t fond of Mursi, both
because the Egyptian was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and
because Abdullah found Mursi exceedingly stupid.

“I see a Muslim Brotherhood crescent developing in Egypt
and Turkey,” the king said. He despises the movement, partly
because it is revanchist, fundamentalist and totalitarian, and
partly because in Jordan it seeks his overthrow. “The Arab
Spring highlighted a new crescent in the process of
development.”

The saving grace in Egypt, he said, was that Mursi seemed
too unsophisticated to successfully pull off his vision.
“There’s no depth to the guy,” he said of Mursi. The king
compared him unfavorably to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist
prime minister of Turkey. Like Mursi, the king asserted, Erdogan
was also a false democrat, but one with patience. “Erdogan once
said that democracy for him is a bus ride,” Abdullah said. “Once
I get to my stop, I’m getting off.”

Unlike Mursi, however, Erdogan was masterful at
manipulating a system that didn’t trust him, the king said.
“Instead of the Turkish model, taking six or seven years --
being an Erdogan -- Mursi wanted to do it overnight.” Recent
events in Turkey, including the government’s miscalculated
response to mass protests, have shown that perhaps even Erdogan
isn’t an Erdogan anymore.

Jordan Islamists

I haven’t spoken to King Abdullah since Egypt’s military
overturned the results of the election that brought Mursi to
power, but I imagine he’s quite pleased today. That’s not only
because No-Depth-Mursi is gone and events have underscored the
king’s analytical acumen, but also because Abdullah’s main rival
for power, the Islamic Action Front, which is the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Jordan branch, is now on its back foot. So are
Islamist political parties across the Middle East. “Islam Is the
Solution,” a common slogan among these parties, will be heard
only infrequently in the coming days.

There are so many good reasons to be happy and grateful for
the latest turn of events in Cairo. Women, as well as the 10
percent of Egyptians who are Christian, should be quite pleased.
The Brotherhood’s most vicious war was on women. It has also
been working assiduously to marginalize, and even terrorize,
Egypt’s Christian minority.

Luckily, Mursi, as King Abdullah suggested, was a
thoroughgoing incompetent, who fulfilled few of the
Brotherhood’s promises, including its most vindictive ones. It
is almost comical now to remember that among Mursi’s more banal
pledges was his vow to solve Cairo’s impossible traffic, a mess
exacerbated in recent days by the presence of millions of anti-Mursi demonstrators on the streets and in the squares.

The millions of people who rallied against the deposed
president were infuriated by his pinched vision of Egypt’s
future, as well as by his mishandling of the economy (a truly
apocalyptic situation) and public safety. They couldn’t abide by
Mursi’s fateful decisions, backed by his masters in the
Brotherhood, to concentrate power in the presidency and deny
positions in his Cabinet to figures from the political
opposition. This last decision, to exclude Egyptians of
differing opinions from any role in governance, could have been
undone through pressure by the U.S. and its ambassador in Cairo,
Anne Patterson. Patterson, however, together with her
indifferent bosses in Washington, chose not to exert pressure on
Mursi. They seemed to believe, for reasons still unknown, that
he and the Brotherhood were firmly ensconced in power. (I wrote
about Patterson’s troubles here).

Democratic Setback

And yet, while Egypt’s military coup represents a victory
for progressivism, it is also a defeat for democracy. Mursi was
freely and fairly elected. If the anti-Mursi demonstrators had
exhibited the patience the president lacked, they would,
theoretically, at least, have had their chance to remove him at
the ballot box. They would also have exhibited a maturity about
the processes of democratic governance.

Had the military not intervened, though, the Muslim
Brotherhood may have tried, over time, to make sure that Egypt’s
first free and fair election was also its last. A number of
Egyptian friends have written me in the past day, arguing that
what the Egyptian people did -- or, more to the point, what the
Egyptian army, responding to the will of the people, did -- was
to forestall the rise of a new Hitler. If the Germans, who chose
Adolf Hitler in a democratic election, had turned on him a year
later, well, you know the rest. The analogy is overdone for so
many reasons, but it is absolutely true that the Muslim
Brotherhood is a totalitarian cult, not a democratic party.

Which suggests one other potentially disastrous consequence
of this week’s coup: The Brotherhood will not go quietly into
obscurity, or into jail. Its members and leaders are true
believers. In particular, they are true believers in martyrdom.
Had they been turned out of office by voters at the end of
Mursi’s term, the opportunities for martyrdom would have been
limited. Now that they have been removed by force and are being
arrested in large numbers, the opportunities are many.

The Middle East analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht told me that the
coup has forestalled the Muslim Brotherhood’s “self-immolation
through the ballot box.”

“This will keep the Brotherhood strong and make them, I
suspect, meaner and nastier and less public,” he said. “They
will grow popular again: Hell, they might still win parliament
in a free vote. Who knows? But the military has just guaranteed
their livelihood and humbled, if not killed, the democratic
process.”

As Tamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Brookings
Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, says, “My
greatest worry is that this coup, if followed by undue
repression against Islamists, will drive the creation of a new
generation of Islamist terrorists in Egypt. Egyptians have
suffered enough from terrorism already.”

Egyptians have suffered enough from everything already. The
hope, as outlandish as it sounds, is that this coup finally sets
their country on a different trajectory.